 This is JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Carl Sketchley, and on behalf of the team here at JSA, welcome to our October virtual round table. As we continue to battle through the global pandemic, the security of our financial networks is becoming more critical than ever. As a result, for the next 45 minutes, we have assembled some of the brightest minds in the industry who are going to take us to the current state of network security for global banking and investments, as well as the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. For those of you who are in the group of first 100 registrants for today, please enjoy your lunch, or if you chose a gift card to a local restaurant. As always though, thank you to all of our viewers for continuing to tune into our round tables. Just before we begin, as usual, we want to hear from you. So go ahead and type your questions into the chat. Time permitting, we will answer them here. But of course, in the last 15 minutes of the hour, we will take the conversation over to LinkedIn. Just search for hashtag JSA virtual round tables or simply click on the direct link that we will be sharing in the chat box shortly. Once there, we will cover any of the questions that our panelists don't get a chance to answer within the next 45 minutes. If you would like to register for upcoming virtual round tables, simply visit jsa.net. Our next one is titled Best Practices for Partnerships in Next Gen Network Infrastructure, and that will take place on November 12th at 1 p.m. Eastern. Check it out and register. Now, let's get started. Today's topic, the State of Financial Networks. To introduce our speakers and moderate, please welcome Charles Desajais, managing partner at Cambridge MC. Charles, thank you for joining us today. The floor is yours. Thank you very much, Carl. I'm very happy to moderate this very impressive panel on this such exciting subject today. So part of the panel, we have Gil Santaliz, CEO of New Jersey Fiber Exchange. Mike Persico, CEO of ANOVA Financial Network, and Sujit Pandar, CTIO of BDX Data Centers. So before they introduce themselves, I just want to remind the subject. So yes, we are talking about the State of Financial Network. This is more critical than ever in this specific period of pandemia that we are all experiencing worldwide. That's the first time this is happening. And of course, the transactions are going exponentially. While they are being remotely on high-curve, are, of course, more tentative. So I would like each of you, Gil, Sujit and Mike, to introduce yourself. But I will also ask the first question now if you don't mind, because today, you see we are within this current state. The network security is very important, especially for global banking on investment. And I would like to have your point of view at what are the challenges or opportunities we rely ahead on this point of view. So maybe, Gil, if you don't mind, if you could start and introduce yourself and maybe I'll take that question. Sure, so it's Gil Santaliz. First of all, Charles, thank you for having me and JSA appreciate putting on this round table for us to have a chance to collaborate because we do miss collaborating and having this opportunity is important to kind of exchange ideas. NJFX is the only cable landing station in the US that is carrier neutral with multiple subsea cables and now 26 plus network providers that exchange traffic in North America from traffic from South America and from Europe, they have four subsea cables. To answer your question, it's been a wake up call for the financial industry seven months ago when their associates went home. And there's been some winners and losers in terms of how they transitioned from this new work at home environment, specifically on the security side, it's been a challenge because a lot of them have large data centers. They do have some adaptation to the cloud, but primarily I would say for the large multinational financial institutions, they have their own facilities and now the employees aren't in the buildings that used to connect to those facilities. So they've had to re-orchestrate their network and that's provided a whole list of security issues for them in terms of how do they authenticate folks coming into their network. As we know, banks have multiple lines of business, it's not just trading, it's all kinds of financial transactions and it's really the trust business they're in. So security is paramount, their customers have to trust them and the transaction that they do are important because they're trusted transactions. So I think I'm curious to hear from the rest of our panelists as well in terms of how they see this unfolding, but the number one priority banks have is to be trusted in a secure transaction environment. Thank you very much, Guillaud. Mike, would you like to introduce yourself and also continue on that question? Sure. Mike Persico, founder and CEO of ANOVA Financial Networks. And for those of you that don't know, we're an international carrier, explicitly for the electronic trading community. So our MO is to connect the world's liquidity centers. And if they're already connected, then to optimize those connections. We do that through fiber medium and also wirelessly. And so we have a big footprint in not only the US, but also expanding over into Asia. And so a lot of our customers are data center centric, but I certainly can touch on what it means to work in trade from home. And I'll share an interesting story, but I first wanna talk about really what we saw right after the pandemic hit, which was people rushed to increase their internet connectivity because they were going to VPN people in from home and the backbone circuits just weren't enough to take in all of these. If you think about how many people work at a Morgan Stanley or JPM or someone like that, that's a lot of people coming into the home office to hit their trading screens that are then connected to the exchange data centers. And so it was a capacity issue before it was a security issue. And then the security became sort of, I think some of the more industry accepted VPN, which to be honest with you is fallible. The types of home security that have been prevalent never took into account the increased requirements of trading. They certainly had that in their home office or in their main office, but people didn't have it in their home office. And so what we found after that when it became apparent that not only was it kind of somewhat insecure, but it might not even meet regulatory standards, we saw a move to people install point to point circuits to their homes. So to get off the public internet and go on to private dedicated circuits. And what we, the humorous part of this was Long Island is we are a lot of the New York traders went. They had homes up there for those of you that don't know it's two and a half hours east on a good day by car. And so we saw an uptick in the public point to point circuits from Manhattan from their desks where they used to sit to now their Long Island home. So one gig dedicated to fiber circuits so they didn't have to be on the internet. And so that's kind of a sign of the times and it remains to be seen how many of those traders go back into the office and for how many people this is what it's gonna look like in perpetuity. Thank you very much, I thought it was very interesting. And Sujit, you are in India, I believe. Mumbai. So yeah. Mumbai currently, yeah. Thank you for having me here. Thanks to you and the JSA team for putting up this round table. I'm Sujit Panda. I am the CTIO of BDX. BDX is an Asian data center platform which we've kind of recently, it's not a startup from, if you look at the EBITDA that we have currently, but yes, the entire team is a brand new team. We've come together to create a new kind of data center platform, right? And kind of challenging the incumbents in most of the markets that we operate in. It's an interesting region to be operating in. We operate in China. We operate, we've got massive facilities in China. We've got two very large facilities in Hong Kong. We have a facility in Singapore. So when the pandemic actually stuck, we kind of right in the middle of it, right? So it's a kind of a perfect storm for us. So the good part, I'll talk about the good part and the bad part, both. So good part was before we started BDX because BDX is basically grown inorganically, right? So the first thing that we had done when we created the platform is what's the kind of unique thing that we're trying to do in the data center industry? And what we decided is that we would want to have minimally manned data centers, right? Trying to look at how do we automate some of the functions that a data center does, right? So as part of that, you know, MO, the entire focus was trying to get, you know, have a central kind of knock so as to speak, which kind of is the humming center where in all the platforms are being managed from, right? So that's the good part. The bad part is, yeah, the humming center, so as to say, you centralize a lot of functions, that's also going to be hit by the pandemic, right? So how do you actually look at, you know, some of the things that we tried to do? How do you keep most of the critical facilities running without any downtime, right? How do you help customers? Because, you know, when you're a very large data center with some of the largest banks in the world operating out of your facilities, how do you support them when they can't get their people in there, right? And they are seeing a massive surge in requirements, massive surge in compute, massive surge in bandwidths. How do you do that, right? You can't get their people there and your people are not able to travel back into the facility. So how do you do it? And that's where the digital investments have paid off in some parts and we did a lot of learnings in terms of what we need to do. And the good thing is, you know, we operate on a jam to December kind of financial year. We do over, we start the AOP thing here. And this is the first time that my CEO walks in and says, hey, you know, you need to ramp up your digital investments, right? Every year, I used to be asked questions like, you need to justify every dollar that you're spending, right? And here he comes, walks in and says, you know, tell me, how are you actually getting everything digital? So there's no question of an ROI anymore. The pandemic has proved that ROI. That's the good part. Okay, okay. Thank you very much for my suggestions and give for your introductions on the question answer. I'd like to go to another question related to your customers and of course, related to the subject is what do you, do your customers today in this context, the financial world, what's more than anything else? And maybe related to that one, what do you wish your customers knew? So I don't know, maybe I'll start with Gil again. Sure. So I wish my customers really understood how our industry works. There was only very few financial customers that take the time to understand how their routes work from their facilities to their destinations. But for example, there's cables across the Mediterranean and there's single points of failures, for example, in the Suez Canal, but there is an option that if they took the time to understand, they could work with a company called Sparkle, a new cable called BlueMed and that allows them to bypass that one pinch point. The day that that problem happens, there'll be very few banks that will transact in a normal fashion. And the ones that didn't pay attention will have some issues. There's lots of issues like this across the US, along the I-95 corridor. People aren't familiar, but most of the traffic that goes from New York down to Ashburn finds itself going over the same exact bridge. And there's only very few financials that have taken the time to look at alternate paths. There's a new cable being developed, for example. It's gonna go from our building in New Jersey down to Virginia, Merrill Beach to Florida. It's gonna be along the coast. And there's two banks that are currently gonna be on that system. I can't imagine the banks that don't go on that system the day that you have a problem going down I-95. So I guess what banks I wish they knew was I wish they took the time to understand our industry and not just buy from a brochure, buy from a sales person presenting lots of products and services, but to take the time to know their routes and know how it actually works so they can ensure their reliability will always be there. Super. Thanks for that. Interesting. Mike, on the same question? You know, what do my clients want more than anything? Volume and volatility. And so, you know, it's been interesting because for the first six months they had both of those in spades. And there was, you know, the first half of the year was the best trading year in the past 10 and probably since 08. And so now things have cooled down since then, since mid-year. And, you know, we're seeing a lot of people kind of waiting with bated breath until the election, which we do expect to be some of the heaviest traded volume in recent years as well. So, you know, for, by all accounts, you know, it's that this has been, you know, a better year on those, from those aspects from a volume and volatility aspect. But, you know, what I wish they knew is that, you know, it's difficult to be an infrastructure provider. You know, we compete at the nanosecond level. You know, that's how decisions are being made. And, you know, Suji, you talk about return on investment and it's easy to justify returns in my business if you're getting milliseconds, you know, for this improvement. But how do you justify the last nanosecond? And frankly, what's the value of it? And, and so, you know, you, Gil, you talk about buying off a brochure or, you know, in our world it's buying off numbers, you know, and numbers that are, you know, two or three decimal point after the decimal point, right? And so, you know, that takes cat-backs investment. That takes constant redesign and deployment of new technologies and it's not a snap of the fingers. There's a ton of R and D that go into this. Now, having said this, I don't wanna sound like I'm crying into my milk because we love what we do. It's exciting, it's challenging. We're on the bleeding edge. You know, maybe a pat on the back every once in a while. Might be nice, you know. So, but that's my answer. Thanks. Okay, thank you very much, Mike. Siddhik, your answer, I'm looking, we are looking over for your answer. Yeah, so, you know, what I think, you know, when we look at security, but what I want my customers to understand is, you know, typically I've seen customers being very focused on one thing, cyber security, right? How do I stop an attack from? And one of the things that I keep saying is, guys, whatever your purpose is, right, if it is going to happen, it will happen, right? So instead of focusing on one piece of the continuum, which is, you know, the perimeter, right, which is, you know, how to stop an attack, start looking at what do you do when you are under an attack and what do you do after an attack, right? Start looking at all the three pieces. And when you look at the plan, in terms of when you try to create a cyber plan, a cyber security plan, don't just look at how do I prevent an attack from that. Because, you know, I've seen attack surfaces changing so much, right? Technology has brought in, and especially the pandemic, and I think everybody would agree when we put everybody at home, I think Gil spoke about it when we put Wi-Fi's, you know, running from the home. You know, I think Mike spoke about the fact that, you know, people want to get off the internet and just start to look at point-to-point links. All of this was focused on a couple of things. It's trying to make things less latency sensitive. It's trying to look at getting off the internet, right? So security was one of the concerns. Latency was the other concern, right? But what do you do when you are under attack, irrespective of whether what you are doing? Because when you look at the work from home scenario, the entire thing, the entire perspective has changed. So I call this a cyber resiliency instead of cyber security, right? And the way we have worked with our customers is that we looked at, we had a product which was BDX Armor, right? So, and I, when I went to talk to my financial customers, typically, and we have got some of the, among the top five banks, we have two of the largest banks in the globe sitting inside of data centers. And when I talk to them, they say, hey guys, you know what? You don't talk about these. We've got the best security professionals, right? And nothing can enter our network. I'm not supposed to be speaking about it, but I've seen some of these best protected networks getting impacted, right? And one of the things that I keep talking to on a peer level is it is going to get impacted. You're going to get impacted. Better start looking at when you are under attack, what will you do? So cyber resiliency is something that I keep kind of pushing my customers to understand a little bit more instead of just preventing attacks. And it's a big subject because this is coring. This is part of the subject in the financial industry, especially, you're going really fast. Why? Because there's something to do. There's nothing to get out of it. And if you are not protected against that, it's a big, it's crazy. And the experience I have in this, this from Europe, you know, I would say that the large companies, the large organizations, maybe are protected, okay. But the small and medium ones, no. They are not protected. And if they get attacked, even the finest ones, but one, they lose everything. They lose their business and they can close their business. And that's absolutely key. Okay, thank you very much. My next question is, I think I will combine two questions actually. It is what is the most exciting development, change you see for the past six months or this year? And also, what is the most adventurous thing you or your company have done during this time? So maybe that's why we are together, but do you want to start with this one? Yeah, chaos. It was a complete paradigm change for us. In terms of, you know, the most adventurous thing that's a very exciting question. You know, we kind of, we kind of gave out notification to all of them by saying that, you know, work from home is permanent now. You decide where you want to work from, right? And this is not just because, you know, we felt it is in fashion, but the first thing that we realized is that because we have a centralized knock, a centralized way of putting all our management infrastructure at one single place, and then the pandemic had the engineers have to operate out of phone, right? So what do you do, right? So, you know, we took a decision that we will ensure that we set up a practice which is knock with all the engineers operating from the restaurants, right? So we shipped out, you know, pre-built kits, right? Saying that this is the kit that goes out. This is how you connect to us. This is how you ensure security. And by doing that, we ensured that we provided an office-like environment at their restaurants. So, and we're still under lockdown, by the way, right? I'm in India. The DR is going to be in Singapore. The primary site is in India and that's in Mumbai. And Mumbai is under lockdowns. People are operating from homes. So the thing was when we took that decision, you know, a lot of people questioned us. Trying to say that you're an essential service is being operated out of people's residences. What about the security? We said, you talk to this, right? And touch with this one very well. And not just with respect to, you know, the technology piece, but with respect to the psychological aspect of it. You know, one of the big things that I have learned personally when we look at work from home is that it's not just about the technology. It's also about the psychological impact from work from home. Right? So we look at both of this in a very innovative way, and that's an adventurous thing that we've done. Okay, thank you very much. And Mike, we want to answer this question. Shall I re-bred them? Sure. So the first part was, what was the most interesting thing in the last six months? And the second part was? I don't know. The first part was the most exciting. Exciting, interesting. The second part, yes, you see. And the second one was the most adventurous thing you and your company have done during this time. So what you see, what you've done. Exciting, both. Yeah, you know, for us, for me personally, we always felt, you know, this is our, myself and the management team, this is our third company that we've been a part of that we've built from the ground up. And our mentality was a little old school. We believed that everybody needed to be in a central location. That was how you established morale and generated a culture and had a confluence of expertise, you know? And this was very traditional. We weren't alone in espousing this perspective. And our big concern was what happens when you take that away? You know, do people still feel like they're a part of something? You know, will the morale remain high? What is your culture then as an organization if you're all disassociated? And then of course, what happens to productivity? Can people still be as productive if they're working from home in their PJs? You know, and what we found was that we were pleasantly surprised. We had serious reservations about doing this. There was challenges. How do you get accounting set up to work remotely when they're inherently kind of a very cloistered organization so you have to put very sensitive files up in an external fashion so people have access to them. But besides that, it was more about culture morale and productivity. And what we found is that people responded very well. And there are some folks that we don't think will come back and we're more amenable to letting them do that as a going concern than we ever were. Now you have the flip side of someone who's younger, they live in an apartment, they stay as roommates and so they work in their bedroom, they sleep in their bedroom, they go eat their meals in their bedroom and they live in 100 square feet. So they were dying for me to reopen the office. And so we ended up being 50-50 in terms of people who come back and who haven't. But my takeaway with all of this is that ultimately our productivity stated high. You find different ways to connect to keep your morale and culture up. And the question is, how long can that continue? I recall Anderson Consulting went to an old remote model and it lasted for great until about year two. And then people became very disaffected and disillusioned and went back to a more traditional environment. That's what they were looking for. And so is this a different scenario, a different situation, perhaps, but long-term I question if it can remain this way. Yeah, and that's a good question. Because as we said, this is happening everywhere by every company, every sector, globally, worldwide. The issue is, what's going to be the next step? Because, okay, it works. As you say productivity works, we can work remotely, we can work from home, we can work from everywhere. At the same time, this is not replacing the real interactivity. We can people look what we are doing right now. Okay, we are doing this exercise. It's great, it works. But of course we would prefer to be in the same room. We would prefer to do that. So it's a little different. So it's a question of so against isolation. And we speak about that also, I think, in many countries. But anyway, Gil, I would like to have your point of view on this, on this question. We at NJFX started initially before COVID started about getting young people involved in our industry. We started at PTC with Millennials and Telcom and Felix Seydan, our team, did a great job in having that first session. Once COVID started, there was a concern that we would stop. And I'm proud to say that our team never stopped. We've got Felix Seydan, Sarah Kurtz, they've been actively involved with groups such as Suboptic, working with JSA and doing programs for high schools locally. A lot of folks have looked for leadership during this time. And what my team is able to do is continue at an effort to inspire young people to look at our industry because now it's imperative that we have the next generation ready to go. So we've got a whole pipeline of young folks that we're trying to attract to come into the industry. We went as far as even hiring an intern this summer that we never met. The intern wrote to us from Washington DC, never came to the office. She did a phenomenal job for us. In terms of exciting things, the most exciting thing that I've seen that we're a part of is we've gotten the cable companies, the residential IP providers to start coordinating in NJFX and offer their access networks to multinational banks, to universities, to hospitals. The whole issue of the internet is that I don't know where it goes. I don't, it's a best effort network. But if you can eliminate hops by having the residential IP providers interconnect with your customers, you all of a sudden have private networks. So I'm happy to say Verizon announced that they're being a customer in a pop at NJFX. A huge provider in the US in terms of residential IP, not only on home services, but on cell phone services as well. Altices here, Comcast is on its way. So we have a massive amount of residential IP and we've got IX providers, so it's D-Kicks, that are coordinating the ISPs so that the enterprise and financials can have better connectivity to their associates that are now at home. Thank you, congratulations for Verizon. Thank you, thank you. That's great. Okay, so my next question actually is, what challenges on opportunity lie ahead, particularly of course during this uncertain times? On which challenges are you most excited to face? And actually, Gil, if you could go after that. You know, I think everyone realizes diversity, network diversity is paramount and we now have in the financial markets everyone paying attention. We spend a lot of time with the bank explaining who the carriers are. The biggest challenge is that they don't have MSAs, so we'll have a large multinational bank move in. They only know how to work with four providers. We've got to find smaller companies that are limble enough that have MSAs in place and can take these unique solutions, put them on their paperwork and allow these banks to give advantage of the best network architecture possible. I think that's going to be important going forward. That's what these banks need to see. We need to provide better solutions, better transparency in how these networks really operate, but we'll define a way for these large multinational banks to be able to execute their agreements. And we're working with companies, there's a NOVA for example, to kind of see if that makes sense. If they have those relationships, they have those MSAs, could they perhaps work with our strategic network providers to pull together a solution and satisfy the bank's requirements. We're going to do a lot more of that and I think that's the next chapter. They need to know how things work. It can't be, you know, get online. I can't give you an answer today. They need clarity on their networks. Okay, thank you very much, Jim. Mike, if you could answer that question as well, what's your point of view? Nice to have you, Jim C. Funny story about bank MSAs, you know, when we first started doing this 11 years ago, we were in front of, you know, Avenue of America's bank and I said, how long to do an MSA? And he said, well, you know, how long to give birth? And I said, oh, you know, labor lasts 24, 36 hours if it's a bad one, right? You know, and they met nine months, right? And so, and it took 14, right? So, you know, that's a very real thing. And, you know, sometimes what we see is you may have to partner. If you wanna provide services to a large multinational corporation and you don't have an MSA, the quickest way to revenue, the quickest way to provide that solution is to partner with someone who does, you know, because the doors aren't open to do new ones. Nobody wants to spend those cycles. And by nobody, I mean them. And so, you know, that's a real challenge. And so I know what you're saying, Gil, in terms of trying to present these diversity options when, you know, the number of people you can go to are somewhat limited. But, you know, in regards to challenges, you know, what we see is, you know, we have three legs of the stool or, you know, three arms of the triangle and it's latency, availability, and capacity. And now, you know, there's been a fourth one introduced which is security. And so the challenge here is how do you satisfy four masters? And, you know, to us, it's difficult to focus on all of them at once. You almost have to force rank them. But the second that you do that and you decide that one is more important than the others, then you have a contingent of clients that are disaffected with that choice. If you say latency is the most important, other people may say capacity, I need capacity. Or if you focus on availability, other people may say, but yes, you know, the whole topic of this panel is security. We need that because my traders are never coming back to work. So what are you doing to focus on that as a company? And so three masters was difficult. Four is a challenge, right? And, you know, it's about being smart with your investment and your R&D dollars and spreading it across all of those aspects to make sure that you're progressing your products across all of those lines. Thank you very much, Mike. I will come back to you on the partnership side on the next question. But I want to have the point of view. Yeah, I think, you know, Mike, about a very important thing, you know, the number of legs on a stool is increasing, right? So the way I look at this is that, you know, when we look at any problem, right? What is that we want to focus on? So, and that's the significant change that we look at. We look at any situation that is going to happen and we look at do we react to the situation or do we react to the people? So we look at, we react to our customers. So, then we look at that aspect, you know, what's not going to change? I, you know, the pandemic happened, everybody asked me, what's changed? I would say, what's not changing? So, Mike, is the diversity in network going to change? Is the customer's requirement for diversity in the network? Like, you know, the customer's saying that I want all, I want you to give me all the four things that the stool is made of or five things or six things as we go forward. So what is that we focus on? We focus on the things that are not going to change. Network resiliency, right? Security, right? And infrastructure resiliency. When I look at a data center, what do you want infrastructure resiliency in terms of the facility and power? You need good security, whether it is the physical security, whether the perimeter security, the way the car comes inside the building, you need good security. And the third piece is connectivity. So from a connectivity standpoint, I think what the first thing that we looked at is, you know, our customers can now connect to networks through software, right? We front in the MSA. It's a trust-based relationship that we've set up. For example, in Hong Kong, we've got the carriers inside and say, hey guys, we're going to be standing, you know, any contract that you're entering is with us. Don't worry about it. We will stand in capacity. If it increases, decreases, don't worry about it. I've got a customer and if he needs more capacity, you don't worry about the billing challenges. We will take care of it. We will stand guard for that. So security, you know, we looked at how do we provide, right from the physical security to the IT security to actually sitting with our customers and trying to consult with them in terms of what we can do for them, right? So that's been the challenging piece, the trying to get our customers to understand our viewpoint in terms of what we think is right, right? And they might not agree, right? So trying to get in consultatives more with them and trying to help them understand our point of view has been the most challenging thing. The good part about this, where there is a challenge, there is an opportunity. We've been security, you know, if I look at numbers, right? We've seen the sales numbers increasing going through the roof from the security side, right? People have asked for, you know, connectivity solutions. People have asked for, you know, using shared VPN services. People have asked for endpoint security because they want to kind of connecting to their assets all over the internet. We have an SDVAN gateway. People, it's kind of, we have increased our SDVAN gateway, sizing three X times from March till the last upgrade happened last month. Three X times SDVAN gateway size. So we've seen everything increasing because there was a challenge. We responded well, so we're making, I shouldn't use the word because it looks a little, you know, these are not the best of times. We made money out of it, but yes, because we responded for the challenge. Okay, super, super excited. I'm just conscious of time. I'm just telling you, we have six minutes left. We have three more questions that could be okay. So Mike, would you like to?